TD Cafe #017 - Drupal Beginners with Mike and Rod

Mike: Hey, now. So before we get started, maybe some introductions. Um, I'm gonna introduce Rob, who's right over there, depending on how the screens are set up. Um, Rob, you've been doing Drupal training for, uh, as long as I have. That's been your bread and butter for a long time. You also do some, some development work as well.

And you and I are gonna talk about what we and others have seen lately, past two, three years or so, uh, the decline of beginner level training. Um, not from a supply standpoint, but from a demand standpoint

Rod: Yes, sir. Well, this is Mike Anello. Uh, Mike has, as he mentioned, has been doing training pretty much as long as I have.

He's, uh, incredibly prominent in the Drupal community. If you've been around Drupal, you know Mike. He won the Aaron Winborn Award. Uh, he's runs DrupalEasy. Uh, in fact, when I do my training and I get to module development, uh, on the last two days of the week, one of the first things I say if, that if you're gonna be serious about module development, you need to head over to DrupalEasy and take the module development, uh, course that Mike has, 'cause it's much more in depth and, uh, really, really great.

So he's, again, a major contributor in the Drupal community. He's organized some little thing called Drupal Camp Florida, uh, that, you know, a few people go to. And, uh, and a whole bunch of others. And so it's, uh, it's gonna be a lot of fun, um, uh, talking about this topic because it's impacted us quite significantly.

Mike: Yeah. So I wanna just, I, I wanna make sure I stay on the side of good here. I'm one of the organizers. I used to lead it. I don't lead the Florida Camp- Fair enough ... Camp team anymore. There's- Fair enough ... there's a lot of other folks who-

Rod: There are

Mike: plenty And I, honestly, yeah, every year I do less and less.

Rod: There you

Mike: go. Which is the dream, right? That's the way it's supposed

Rod: to be. Yeah. And still get credit for it.

Mike: Yeah.

Rod: Yeah, I know.

Mike: So, so this stuff, um, that we're gonna talk about, this is, I know it's been on your mind, it's been on my mind. It's been happening. Or, you know, it's like a slow motion car crash over the past few years.

Um, and where were we when we- W- was it in Chicago? Yeah That we ... Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. DrupalCon Chicago.

Rod: Had

Mike: breakfast, yeah. Yeah, we had breakfast, um, with, um, with Addie from Drupalize Me as well, um, in DrupalCon Chicago. And I, I don't know the right... I mean, it just ended up being the main topic of discussion.

Sure. I don't think it was on purpose, it just kind of happened, right?

Rod: Well, it's probably the biggest thing going on in, in our professional lives right now. It certainly is for me.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It

Rod: certainly is for her, I think. And she- Yeah ... I think she'd say that.

Mike: No, I think that's safe. I think that's safe to say.

Rod: Yeah.

Mike: Um, and I'd had in the back of my mind a, um, you know, a blog post or something that had been, you know, rattling around in there. It hadn't really, I hadn't really done a brain dump onto, you know, i- into a, a word processor yet. Um, but after, after we talked, I'm like, yeah, I think now, now I have, I have focus as far as, like, what, you know, what needs to be said and what I think needs to be done.

Um, and we'll see if, Rod, if you agree with me by the end of this or, um... Anyway, so let's talk about what we're seeing first. So let me, let me go right back to you, Rod. So as far as beginner level Drupal training, what have you seen in the past two, three years from your, your per- personal perspective?

Rod: Sure.

Um, I used to teach Drupal's, the, uh, Acquia certification, uh, course. It's called Drupal Immersion, and it's a five-day course, full days on... It used to be in person, of course, until COVID. And then Zoom, uh, then, uh, co- uh, COVID hit, and now it's all over Zoom. Um, I used to do that twice a week. Uh, twice a month, sorry.

Uh, been a long week here, sorry. Twice a month. Typically for, uh, one week for one agency, and then another week for, uh, either Acquia itself or another agency that worked with Acquia. Um, and now I have done one since- Two since last July. So from twice a month to two in almost a year. That's, that's what I'm seeing- Yeah

in my, in my training business. Uh, that's a- Well- ... beginner level course, for sure.

Mike: And you've also, you know, y- you've also... We've both seen it, but I think it's probably impacted you more. At, uh, Drupal events we've seen a decrease as well.

Rod: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Uh, you know, for years it was 10, 20, 30. I mean, I remember DrupalCon Prague, that's going back a ways, um, I had a...

I think I had over 75 in the room for the, the one day beginner training. Right. Uh, now DrupalCon doesn't even have beginner training. Uh, there's Drupal in a Day, but that's not sponsored by the Drupal Association, that's something else that, uh, uh, altogether. So yeah, we're not even doing Drupal training, beginner training, at DrupalCon.

Right. And at camps, yeah, three, three to five on a good, on a good camp.

Mike: Uh- Yeah, three to five people, attendees. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we should, we definitely should not discount, um... And I know it wasn't your intention, 'cause we've talked about this, discount what Drupal in a Day is- Oh, no ... what those folks are doing.

It's amazing. No,

Rod: I think it's amazing.

Mike: It's great.

Rod: Yeah. I

Mike: think it's

Rod: fantastic.

Mike: Um, I think that's part of the solution, actually- Yeah ... is more stuff like that. But that's, that's kind of a different thing because, um, that's only happened at maybe three or four DrupalCons now.

Rod: Right.

Mike: Um, there's a lot of effort that goes into that to reach out and find students-

Rod: Yep

Mike: um, at technical colleges, high schools, universities, um, as opposed to what Rod and I are talking about, or what maybe is more historic, historically prevalent in the Drupal community- Yeah ... is you put up a beginner training at a Drupal event and people come through word of mouth or through their colleagues or whatever.

Yeah. So two kind of different things. And, um, and it's, it's this latter one that we're talking about that's really just, you know, fell off a clift, a cliff. Mm-hmm. Um, I can echo, you know, what Rod's saying. You know, we have had at Drupal easy a beginner level class, um, uh, called Drupal Career Online. It was actually our first long form class.

It's been going for over 15 years.

Rod: Wow.

Mike: Um- That's awesome ... yeah. And it was, it, um- Uh, we've had hundreds of students come through it. You know, it's, it was, you know, two half days a week or three half days a week over, uh, over 12 weeks. Um, and what we've seen in the past two or three years is a lot fewer, like, individual signups.

You know, people saying, "Hey, I wanna learn Drupal, you know, so here I am." Um, that has, you know, dropped way down. Um, the majority of our beginner students are coming to us because, um, an organization with a development team has contacted us and said, "Hey, we need our team trained up on Drupal." Um, so our, our beginner class is, is it's kind of like a private class at this point.

And we actually made the difficult decision earlier this year to, um, turn it into a, a, a completely private class. Um, there's no... It's, it's no longer a public offering.

Stephen: Hmm.

Mike: Um, and that actually has to do—Rod knows more about this, I'm not gonna bore everyone, but we got a license for this class through the state of Florida, um, that's cost us a lot of time and money to, to keep going.

And if we, if we turn it private, we don't have to spend that, that time and money. So we made that, we made that decision. Um- So also, I reached out to some other trainers, um, a- about, you know, see what they saw. Um, you know, I mentioned Addy. Um, you know, Rod and I had a nice conversation with Addy in Chicago from DrupalEyes.me.

Um, and you know, Addison said that they had to lay off some folks, um, due to revenue drop at DrupalEyes.me. Um, there's just not as many, you know, beginner Drupal developers who are looking for that type of, you know, screen cast and, uh, private, uh, documentation or private tutorials, um, for Drupal. Um, Rob, another thing is you've a- you told me about the, your YouTube videos.

Yeah. 'Cause you've got a lot of YouTube videos. Yeah, talk about that for a moment.

Rod: So really interesting. Um, again, back in the day, I had, uh, I put up a Drupal 8, introduction to Drupal 8 class. So this is now probably almost six years ago. 4.4 million views. Wow. Um, yeah. The OS training, uh, channel that I contributed to for quite a long time, if I put a video up there, again, going back that far, it would be views in the thousands for, uh, you know, uh, for a very quick three to five-minute tutorial type thing.

Um- But

Mike: within, within a month? It would take a month to get that number, or how long?

Rod: Uh, no, it'd be pretty quick. So, you know- Oh, okay ... maybe two, three. Uh, well, maybe a week. Right. So again, uh, OS Training, uh, has I think 45,000 subscribers at this point. So that's pretty healthy. Of course, they do a lot more than Drupal, but for the past- Right

uh, two years it was Drupal only. Um, so now, uh, and it's not- By the way, this just isn't me. Um, I've done, I've looked at everybody's channels. Uh, all major players, the YouTube channels. Uh, videos are getting between, you know, 100 views to maybe on a really "viral video" in Drupal, you'll get 1,000 or 2,000 views.

Um, the most active Drupal YouTuber right now is probably Web Wash, although the Drupal Association is obviously starting to put out a lot of video. Mm-hmm. But he gets, uh, you know, two, 300 views to, uh, like I said, a couple of thousand depending on the topic. He does very long form videos. I just released a Drupal AI class, and o- only video, only two out of the 11 videos are over 1,000 views.

So the decline in views in the Drupal space is, uh, I would call it drastic, for sure. All right,

Mike: so one more data point. Yeah. We, we gotta, we're gonna g- we're gonna turn this around and, and not be so depressing. Uh, before we started recording, I said, "We can't, like, it can't be all negative. We have to."

Rod: And

Mike: it's not.

But it's happening. It's

Rod: not

Mike: all negative. It's happening, so

Rod: yeah.

Mike: Yeah. Um, so a couple more data points. I reached out to a couple other, uh, trainers. Um, Wayne, uh, I believe it's Eaker, E-A-K-E-R. Hopefully I'm saying his last name right, Eaker, um, from Drupal, uh, tutor.com. And Ashraf, who both Rod and I've known for a while from, uh, Debug Academy.

Um, you know, everything they're seeing is, is what, is what we're seeing as well. So it's not, you know, this is, uh, you know, I think it's, it's more than fair to say this is happening everywhere in the Drupal space. It's not like there's some big, you know, training gorilla that came in and he's taking all the business.

It's just all the business has shrunk drastically. Yeah. Um, so why? You know, I think Rod and I, we talked, and I think we, we pinpointed three reasons. You wanna take us through those three reasons there, Rod?

Rod: Yeah.

Mike: Yeah.

Rod: So-

Mike: I mean, the first, the first one's the obvious one. Actually second on my list, but it's the

Rod: Oh, yeah, AI.

Yeah. Um, I mean, who isn't using AI anymore? Uh, in fact, I'm here in Chicago this week at a client site, and we just launched their really large website. Uh, couple of things came up at the very last minute and, uh, I could have spent, you know, an hour or two writing, uh, a script to go through and, say, one of them was, for instance, to import 1,400 nodes that hadn't been previously imported.

The feeds module would've choked on that. Uh, so Claude wrote a script, a Python script, and took care of it in about an hour. Who isn't using AI anymore? In fact, uh, on Dries', uh, on LinkedIn just a couple of weeks ago, right? There was a guy who said, "I haven't, I haven't tried Drupal in years. So I sat down with Claude, and in a couple of hours I had a Drupal site."

And Dries got online and said, "Way to go. That's, that's what we wanna hear." So AI is obviously, um... has all the knowledge and can actually help you with your Drupal work. So that's probably one of the biggest factors. Although it's, it's not, it's, it, it only really, uh, deals with the last probably eight, nine, 12 months, not the decline that started several years ago.

Yeah. But it's certainly accelerated the decline. Absolutely.

Mike: Yeah, it wasn't the catalyst, but it's definitely the gasoline.

Rod: Yeah.

Mike: Yeah. What, what's the catalyst?

Rod: Well, uh, you know, again, there's, there's a lot of thinking around that. I know. And your- Yeah ... your, the reason you listed is, is kind of the same thing, um, that I would say as well.

Uh, modern Drupal just isn't, uh, as nearly approachable, um, anymore. And I know you, you are, you harken back, and both of us harken back to the pre-Drupal 8 days, and Drupal 8 is a... It's well documented, the kind of radical shift that Drupal 8 brought. Um, and, uh, you know, both on a positive and a, and a difficult note, uh, we lost a lot of, a lot of momentum with Drupal 8, but it was a shift that absolutely needed to happen.

So, you know, it's, it's a bit of, you know, as my grandkids would say, 6-7. Um- How

Mike: dare you?

Rod: Oh my gosh. I know. I couldn't, I could not resist. Just end

Mike: the pod- I'm sorry ... e- e- end, end this now. I'm out of here. Forget it.

Rod: But, um, so, you know, you've got- Uh, I'm gonna ta- I was gonna talk about it later, but, um, I'll mention it now and maybe we'll get to it later.

I just did the keynote in Drupal Camp Ottawa, and the topic was basically Drupal site building from confusion to confidence. Uh, my premise is that, and forgive me for all of the Drupal developers, especially core developers that are watching this, 'cause I said it in my talk. I said, "You kinda screwed us over every single time you made a major release."

Site builders can't, who, who don't write code, need to be able to build sites in Drupal. But with every major release, even seven, it took site builders a long time to get to the point where they could build sites without spending thousands on a theme. So in seven we had, like, Display Suite and Panopoly and Panels.

In eight and nine and ten we now have, uh, Layout Builder of course. But that took a long time to come, and you've got to install about 15 modules. Hours of configuration to get it to work well. So my premise was that Drupal, um, needs to... The Drupal core developers need to treat site builders as their primary customer.

'Cause if site builders don't choose Drupal, nobody's choosing Drupal. So the light at the end of that tunnel in my talk is Canvas, Canvas AI, and Drupal AI. And I know we're gonna talk more about that l- probably in a bit, but, uh. Right. But, uh, I've got a blog post on it and I can share that later as well.

But that's- Yeah,

Mike: that'll be in the... We'll put a link to that in the

Rod: resources for this. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, you know, that wasn't on your list, but it's certainly pretty high on mine. I guess it's part of the whole Drupal 8 isn't- Yeah ... as approachable. Um, and, uh, but I think we're fixing that. So I'm, I'm very, very excited about the future, just not in training.

Mike: Yeah, it's gonna be interesting. I mean, so, um, the approachable bit I think still holds, right? Yeah. Because it's, it's not feasible for someone to... And maybe this is just like, you know, this, maybe this is my age talking. Who knows? But, you know, back when I got into Drupal, so I'm like back when I walked to school through snow.

Anyway, um, you know, you could, you could download a zip file. You know, extract it, and if you had WAMP or MAMP or Acquia Dev Desktop or one of those- Oh, my goodness ... you could be up and running-

Rod: Yeah ...

Mike: without ever seeing a command line.

Rod: Yes.

Mike: It's just not really possible today unless you're working on in a remote environment.

Yes, there is the Drupal, what, the, the CMS installer I think it's called, which is a download that runs locally and st- you know, that, that's still there. But I'm not gonna say little, too little too late, it's just we lost a lot of people in the-

Stephen: Yeah ...

Mike: six, seven years between. It's more than that, but I'm gonna say six or seven.

Oh my God, geez, I just said six, seven. Yeah. Sorry. Six, seven. Six or seven years. Good golly. I'm ashamed. I'm ashamed of myself, really. I'm better than that.

Rod: Oh, that's so funny.

Mike: I was gonna say, I, uh, I, I, I'll say five, six years, 'cause that way it seems like it's not as long as it actually was, and we're younger than we, we, we think we are.

But we're not, so moving on. Yeah. So we lost a lot of people.

Stephen: Yeah.

Mike: And even to this day, like, command line is scary for, for a lot of people. Um, it's not scary for d- professional developers, but professional developers know about Drupal already.

Rod: Yeah.

Mike: Right? We need the site builders. Let me, let me tell you about the-

Rod: Yeah

the last team that I taught. Um, no developers. It was, it was marketing and, uh, web maintainers, but no software developers, no coders at all. Yeah. And when we got to the command line, um, yeah, it was... I, I had to assure them that, that this was easy and I could teach them everything they needed to know during this class, which of course is only mostly true.

But, you know, uh, we got, we got all the commands they needed out of the way. Um, were they proficient at the end of the week? No. Uh, because, you know, you do Drupal in a week and your, your mind, your brain is swimming at the end of it. Uh, even the two-day site builder class is, is not enough to make somebody, uh, efficient or proficient in Drupal, of course.

It's scratching the surface. Um, and of course right now, you know, you want to build a content type w- and f- get to the point where you have a page that looks good. That might be three, four, five, 600 clicks, including downloading a ton of modules. Right. Um, so, or installing. Um, so yeah, it, it's, uh, it's definitely a challenge.

Mike: Yeah. So let's, let's move on to the third reason why, you know-

Rod: I guess I understand ... why we're seeing

Mike: what we're seeing.

Rod: Oh, yeah.

Mike: Yeah.

Rod: Um- Which

Mike: is... Yeah, go ahead.

Rod: Uh, yeah, no, you go ahead. This, this, this one, I think you're much closer to this one than I am.

Mike: Uh, you know, I'm a bit closer, but it's, you know, uh, what I wrote down is lack of a u- unified community market.

Um, we do, and, and this is the way I look at it. As a community, we, we kick ass on the technical path. Right? We can write code, we can, we can do g- we have, we have great UX people, we have great accessibility people. We can design features, we can implement features, we can, we can spin releases. We can do all that stuff.

Um, and again, that's great if, you know, if you only need developers to pay attention to you. But we want new people to pay attention to us. We want people outside of Drupal to pay attention to us. That's where, like, community marketing has to happen. And I'm using the phrase community marketing as opposed to, like, just marketing because, you know, a lot of agencies market their services, and some of them say that it's Drupal, some of it's, some of them don't.

And that doesn't matter. We need to basically, I, I think, uh, and this I'm gonna move into right into one of the solutions. Sure. Um, um, 'cause we have had marketing efforts in the community in the past. Promote Drupal is probably the highest, um, visibility one. Um, and Promote Drupal is great, uh, it just wasn't enough.

Stephen: Yeah.

Mike: In my opinion. Um, there's some, some stuff going on in the past year where the, the Drupal Association and even ad hoc groups of, of agencies have gotten together and started, um, exhibiting at non-Drupal events. Um, whether they're other technical events or whether they are, like, industry vertical events to kind of promote that, hey- Here's a, here's a platform that might suit you.

Um, I think we need more of that. Yeah. And not just more. We need, um... The only way I can describe it is if you're aware of, like, the AI initiative that's happening right now in Drupal that's really well organized, really well funded.

Rod: Yeah.

Mike: Has a lot of momentum behind it. Like, that, I would love to see something like that, but for promoting Drupal, um, at places where Drupal isn't, you know, already a fixture.

Rod: Right. Right.

Mike: Like, like- Yeah. We, we- We don't need to be spending money at DrupalCon events or, you know, but-

Rod: I agree. We're, we're preaching to the choir, as they would say.

Mike: Exactly. Yeah. We need... And, uh, it's a skill set that we're not great at. We have to become better at it, or we have to find people who can help with it.

Um, but I, I, I don't know. I mean, uh, the alternative is we, you know, w- we're kind of hoping that our technical acumen is gonna shine through and break through, and all these people are gonna come flooding to Drupal because it's technically outstanding.

Rod: Yeah.

Mike: I, I don't think that's-

Rod: No ...

Mike: gonna happen.

Rod: No. Yeah.

Um, a- again, going back to my training with a lot of beginner classes, um, you get, you get to the point of, you know, by the end of the week talking about the, the technical excellence of Drupal, and I don't think there's anything better. But the sticky wicket, as it were, especially for people who have used Wix, Squarespace, even WordPress with, uh, Elementor, is, yeah, but how do I make beautiful pages?

And this is, again, going back to, to the premise of, of my talk in Ottawa was when you can sit down as a site builder and direct Drupal with your voice or with, with some prompts, when you can orchestrate Drupal to build a beautiful site, landing page, whatever, like we're seeing with the potential of, of Canvas AI and, and Drupal AI, um, that's when people will get excited about building with Drupal again.

'Cause we're not talking about technologists, right? Um. Right. If, if, if you're a technical person, you're gonna look at the modern CMSs and go, "Drupal is clearly a winner." It's got structured data. It, it's got... For all of the good reasons. Um- Overcoming that hurdle of layout and ease of site building for a marketing team-

Mike: Theming

Rod: is, is crucial Like we said,

Mike: making it look nice. Yeah.

Rod: Yeah. It, it's, it's crucial. When we can demonstrate, like we're starting to- And I 100% agree, outside of the Drupal community, when we can start to demonstrate the ease of use of Canvas AI and how unbelievably amazing it is for a very low barrier to entry, um, site builders may, I mean, I'm not gonna promise anything, but I think they will.

Site builders will start picking it up and going, "All right. I can handle Composer. I can, I can do some of this command line stuff if I have to, because I can finally build, um, beautiful stuff in Drupal without depending on a themer to constantly," and that's the key word, constantly-

Mike: Mm-hmm ...

Rod: create template overrides and beautiful pages for me.

Mike: Yeah.

Rod: Right? So I'm gonna get a theme, whether it's from Drip Yard or from the, uh, the theme, uh, what are they calling it? Marketplace. Um, and, uh, and I might pay for a theme. I might pay a themer several thousand dollars to get me to where I am, where I need to be, but then I can take over. It, it essentially is the promise of Site Studio from Acquia, which is a promise that, uh, it has got more complexity than you can shake a stick at.

It was a great idea. It, it's just an incredibly complex solution. And, um, not knocking it at all because I've got clients who use it, I teach it, and, and I think it's a terrific product, but my goodness, it's hard to use. So again, going back to do site builders really wanna use this? Uh, probably not. So.

Mike: Yeah.

And I think the trick is gonna be, uh, you know, there's gonna be a lot of solutions out there that allow you to make beautiful sites, you know, using AI. Yeah. Or not. Right? Um, the trick is gonna be, and this is where, you know, again, this is just messaging, right? And this is getting the word out that- Yes, you can create a beautiful site, but by creating a beautiful site in Drupal, you get all of these things-

Rod: Yeah

Mike: that Drupal's had for a long time that are beneficial.

Rod: Yeah, 100%.

Mike: The, the, the structured data that, you know, JSON LD. I mean, uh, uh, any, you know, all of that, you know, the stuff the community has put, you know, countless hours into. Um, you know, it, it's not enough just to be able to, you know, give site builders something to make a beautiful site because there's g- there's competition in that space.

We have to move out of that space- Yeah ... into the space that is, you can make a beautiful site and look at all this stuff you get by doing it on Drupal.

Rod: Can't agree more.

Mike: Right. Can't agree more. And it, so-

Rod: Yeah ...

Mike: like, it'll be great, you know, uh, you know, I, I would love to see at some point in the future, um, like a 10-minute demo starting from nothing.

Rod: Mm.

Mike: And building just like, like a restaurant site or something or something.

Rod: Yep, yep.

Mike: Um, that looks nice. You know, to, to your point, easy, easy for a site builder to, to manage, change, you know, change data and, and, and stuff like that. But then also really hammers home that by building this on Drupal, here's all the advantages you get as opposed to building it on Wix or here or there.

Rod: Yeah.

Mike: Um, and some of that, some of it is just gonna be the fact it's on open source, right? Yeah. Top to bottom. That's gonna be a, that'll definitely move the needle for, for some people. But, you know, this is where like messaging and marketing is gonna come in. We're gonna have to figure out, okay, well, what, what's gonna move the needle?

Rod: Yeah.

Mike: Like, what, what is the message? What are the things that Drupal has that we really need to, you know, promote in order to get people to, like, to look, right?

Rod: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Um, but- Yeah ... Mike, we've, we've been having this conversation probably as long as you and I have been talking. So.

Mike: No one's listening.

Rod: No. No one's listening. Well, they will now. We're on, we're on a podcast.

Mike: Okay. Yeah, maybe.

Rod: Um.

Mike: Yeah.

Rod: But, but no, no, you're, you're right. Um, the, the amount of money and effort and organization and enthusiasm that's gone into the Drupal AI project, um, needs to translate into an overall marketing- Yeah ... um, platform for, for Drupal outside of- Other- Yeah

Mike: otherwise I, I don't know what we're doing. It's like we're building, it's like we're building amazing gadgets, but not telling anybody about them.

Rod: Yeah. You know? We're hoping people will just find them on their own.

Mike: Just find

Rod: them. But, but- Yeah ... I'll tell you, you know, the, the number one marketing tool in the world is YouTube, and, um, and nobody's watching.

At least not- Yeah ... not like they used to. Um- Yeah ... even the Drupal Association, who by, has by far the largest number of views, um, uh, followed closely by s- funny enough, MidCamp. Uh, and then, um, uh, GovCon. Those are the- Sure ... three biggest Drupal channels, specific Drupal channels. But again, you go into their videos and e- even the AI videos that are coming out of, out of the Drupal Association are, like, hundreds of views, not thousands of views.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah.

Rod: Um, so yeah, it, it's how do you get people to start even watching content about a topic that they've got little interest in 'cause they've written it off years ago? Um, and we hear that quite a bit as well. So Drupal, is that still a thing? Well, yeah. You have no idea.

Mike: All right. Well, I, I think we've covered it.

I think we've talked about, you know, we've talked about what we're seeing, why we think it's happening, and what we think needs to happen. Um, I think now you and I just step back and watch it happen.

Rod: Oh, I, I hope so.

Mike: I think that's the plan now. Yeah. If only. If only.

Rod: Yeah. You know, it's funny, when I, again, doing this talk in, in Ottawa, I kinda took a risk when I, when I talked.

I didn't talk down to developers, and I made sure I didn't, but I certainly challenged them with the idea of who's your customer? And the idea that developers, even in an age of AI and Drupal AI and Canvas AI, developers are more important, not less important. Themers are more important, not less important.

Uh, you can't do modern Drupal without a great theme. So, you know, again, the, the marketplace is gonna, I think, going to be, uh, very important moving forward. And that concerted effort that includes AI theming, Drupal 12, of course, which is coming, and of course Drupal CMS, um- Couple that excellence in technology with what you're talking about, the, the marketing piece that's driven, funded, purposeful, uh, I think, I think we can make a dent there.

Mike: Yeah. So, and, you know, and there's... But this is not, like, a new idea. I don't wanna... But-

Rod: No ...

Mike: we're not, we're not claiming that this is our idea. Definitely not. Um, I just feel like it's-

Rod: It's

Mike: a nice idea. Yeah, exactly. That'd be nice, but, um, you know, I, I've heard this idea and, like, plans for this idea, but it just, it seems like nothing ever really materializes.

Um, marketing's definitely not my strong suit.

Rod: No, not mine either.

Mike: Yeah. But, you know, I-

Rod: So it's easy for us to throw stones at all the marketers out there going- Exactly ... "You're not doing your job." Well, you know what? You come and do our job and you'll find- Sure ... out how hard

Mike: it is. Please help. How about we just, how about we end with that?

Yeah. Please, pl- marketing people, please help us. We desperately need it. Yeah. All right. I think we're good. Rob, are we all set? I think we're good, right?

Rod: I think so. I think so. All right. This is

Mike: fun. Always good to touch base with you.

Rod: Yep. You too. It was a great blog post. It was. Oh, I appreciate that. It's a lot of food for thought there.

Mike: All right. Well, I guess that's it. I guess it's time to close the cafe.

Rod: Okay.

Mike: The TD cafe. Pay our tab and get out of here.